The serious Anecdote naturally took precedence of its jocular evolution or offspring; and indeed the latter, as is obvious enough, could hardly exist as a congener, till artificial and more or less complicated forms of social life had been developed. Even the entries in such books as Plutarch, where he narrates some incident in the biography of one of his heroes of a nature less grave than usual, and of a sufficiently playful or salient nature to have tempted the editors of the ancient collections of _facetiæ_ to include them in their pages, cannot quite properly be said to be exceptions to the rule, that the Jest, as we understand it, was unknown to the ancients, although all civilised nations have in their turn possessed a keen sense of the laughable, and have devised methods of holding up to derision those who deviated from the prevailing standard of decorum, morality, or etiquette; or, again, who exposed themselves to personalities from special causes. The selections from classic sources in the _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_, printed in the time of Henry VIII., have on this account a tendency to weight the book, and render it less attractive and readable at the present time than its famous contemporary, entitled _A Hundred Merry Tales_, which was prepared on a more judicious principle, and excluded all but tales of more or less current interest. The favourite Greek and Roman authors with compilers of _Ana_ have been at all periods Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Lucian, Athenæus, and Diogenes Laertius. It is very rarely that Homer or Cicero is enlisted in their service by the caterers for popular entertainment; and even in the case of the _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_ the stories about the ancients are appended at the end, as if they had been an afterthought or a stratagem for making out the copy.